Made in Berlin The Place and BITE: 03 bring Berlin's contemporary dance to London May - June 03. From londondance.com

Berlin’s vibrant community of contemporary dance artists is showcased in Made in Berlin, a season of cutting-edge dance jointly presented by The Place and BITE: 03 at the Barbican. Over six weeks in May and June, nine companies will present a series of diverse but distinctive works.

It's Physical Theatre (And No Dance) Week in London. After the antics of Sankai Juku, the Lucky Alphonse (In the Middle Again) tangles of Sasha Waltz and her Tanztheater troupe from Berlin in Körper. Seek not for dancing in either event, but with Waltz - an inapt name in the light of what she offers us - there is at least activity. Of a pretty damn peculiar kind and, in general, one determinedly spirit-lowering: the Tanztheater gang (president: Pina Bausch, with Johan Kresnik and Susanne Linke as acolytes, and with the Mats RK and Nederlands Dans Theater crowd as camp followers) are not the sunniest of souls.

Waltz’s Körper dates from 1999, the year she was appointed one of the artistic directors of Berlin’s innovative Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz. It’s the largest production in Made in Berlin, a contemporary dance series co-presented by the Barbican’s BITE:03 programme and The Place. Highlights include Thomas Lehmen’s Schreibstück (The Place, June 18), a conceptual experiment by three international dance-makers working independently from the same choreographic “script”, and a lively piece from the young ensemble Two Fish (The Place, June 28).

Dance is always about bodies - how cleverly they function, how variously they move, how mysteriously they embody both solid matter and spirit. But few choreographers have scrutinised the human body from such doggedly strange angles as Sasha Waltz in Korper.

Cathartic carnival of flesh Ismene Brown for The Daily Telegraph reviews Körper at the Barbican.

Dance theatre has a potential gut excitement that is quite different from the effect of purer, more choreography-led dance. The portrayal of ordinary human beings locked into their social reality, rather than highly trained ubermensch in fantasy worlds, answers many people's objections to dance as a performing art. This sort of dance is the expression of repression - the untrained body can still speak in movement when the mouth cannot - though it demands a lot of funding to build the reality sets and surreal props, and allow dancers months to prepare their cathartic psychological toybox.

Here's a question for you - have a guess whether Mr Crisp enjoyed this Tanztheater performance. You guessed right.....

Sasha Waltz/Körper By Clement Crisp for The Financial Times

It's Physical Theatre (And No Dance) Week in London. After the antics of Sankai Juku, the Lucky Alphonse (In the Middle Again) tangles of Sasha Waltz and her Tanztheater troupe from Berlin in Körper.Seek not for dancing in either event, but with Waltz - an inapt name in the light of what she offers us - there is at least activity. Of a pretty damn peculiar kind and, in general, one determinedly spirit-lowering: the Tanztheater gang (president: Pina Bausch, with Johan Kresnik and Susanne Linke as acolytes, and with the Mats RK and Nederlands Dans Theater crowd as camp followers) are not the sunniest of souls.

Like a troubling dream you can't quite recall, Sasha Waltz's Körper slips from the memory. The sole image that remained with me from the Berlin Schaubuhne company's Edinburgh Festival performance in 2000 was of naked bodies pressed on top of each other in a Perspex frame.

If nothing else, Sasha Waltz knows how to get a message across. Even if you didn't know the title - Körper (German for bodies) - of her 90-minute piece, you would guess it from the images. A shallow showcase slowly fills with near-naked bodies, their protuberances squashed against the glass. Two pairs of dancers create composite creatures, legs facing the wrong way. And another, medically inspired sequence shows dancers listing the value of their body parts - a liver (€1,300), a kidney, a pancreas.

At the Barbican, for the production Körper, by the Tanztheater choreographer Sasha Waltz and her company from the Schaubühne in Berlin, I spotted a notice warning us to expect “nudity and loud music”. So what’s new? In fact, Hans Peter Kuhn’s ambient soundscape — snuffles, plinks, gurgles and twangs — only gets crashy at the end. I could swear his machine noises at one point were formulating the words “Keep fit”.

Toss the German word tanztheater into a roomful of radical theatre folk, sit back and see what happens. Very soon the mantra "Pina Bausch" will rise above the general hum. Announce you have a line on tickets and you'll find some new best friends. But tell them the artist is Sacha Waltz and draw a blank. Sacha who? Sacha Waltz - now a director of the legendary Schaubühne theatre in Berlin. Remember it, because the mantle of Pina Bausch is imminently hers.

Salamon / Le Roy / Christiane Muller, The Place, London By Nadine Meisner for The Independent

So how is the contemporary dance scene in Berlin? If you think only demon dance enthusiasts should want to know, let alone ask the question, then you're being unjustifiably insular. Germany not only has a long modern dance history, it actually gave birth to modern dance in Europe. Through Mary Wigman it exercised an influence on the emergence of its American equivalent. And through choreographers like Kurt Jooss and Pina Bausch it has made its dance theatre style famous throughout the world.

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